November 22, 2013

Vows

By MIMI READ

There was an unacknowledged matchmaker involved in the romance of Marie La France and Ken Jackson: New Orleans.

The sensual power of the city’s food, music and architecture impelled the couple from the moment they met in 2003. They were standing on opposite sides of the bar in one of the city’s most fashionable restaurants — she a vivacious Audrey Hepburn type in a fuchsia dress, he Zenlike and older but still boyish in a brown suit.

Two years later, Hurricane Katrina hit, punching a hole in the roof of the shotgun house they shared, whereupon they sought refuge in post-Sept. 11 Manhattan.

But with New Orleans firmly lodged in their imaginations, Ms. La France, now 32, and Mr. Jackson, 45, returned there to marry on Nov. 9 in a walled compound close to the Mississippi, the courtyard stained hot pink with riotous bougainvillea.

“It’s like being on a French island,” Glenn G. Dukes, one of Mr. Jackson’s oldest friends, said of the collection of former stevedores’ rowhouses that have become an events venue called Race and Religious, its crumbling patina embodying the essence of this city.

After marrying the couple there, Mr. Dukes, a Universal Life minister and civil rights lawyer, said of the groom: “He’s loyal, honest, real, adventurous. Not necessarily an out-loud person. A lot of what happens, happens under the soil. I told him he’d peaked when he met Marie.” He characterized Ms. La France as “happy, electric and insanely capable.”

Ms. La France, an American studies major and amateur singer fresh out of Connecticut College, had lived in New Orleans only three days when she boarded a streetcar and plopped onto a varnished wooden seat next to a female passenger. As they rattled along St. Charles Avenue, the woman pointed out the restaurant Herbsaint, proclaimed it great, and added that she had heard it was hiring.

Post-graduation, Ms. La France had counted on securing a fellowship to study the roots of American music in Africa. When that fell through, there was no Plan B, so on a whim she moved to the city. She quickly concluded that given her love of food, having grown up in a New Jersey household where her mother cooked Ethiopian cuisine, among others, she would fill out an application at Herbsaint. She was hired to be a hostess.

Ms. La France, who at the time was “single and not looking,” loved that she had landed in a place where food is so much a part of the culture.

“When you come back from traveling, people in New Orleans don’t ask where you went,” she said. “They ask where you ate. I thought I was going to be here for six months, move to New York and have an apartment by myself.”

But on her first day on the job, as she was being trained in the finer points of jotting down names, she turned to see Mr. Jackson walk behind the bar and pick up the phone. “Who is that?” she asked her trainer. She found out he was the wine and beverage director and one of Herbsaint’s owners.

The couple, who met when working at a restaurant, at the reception.

William Widmer for The New York Times

“I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’m done,’ ” she said. “It was as if I’d been carrying around a backpack of bricks my whole life and didn’t know it, and when I saw him, it was gone. That’s what love at first sight felt like to me.”

His shy manner and economy of words only added to his appeal.

“But when he does speak, he says exactly the right things,” she said. “It takes me 10 sentences to say what Ken can in just a few words.” There was also that enigmatic moment when he mentioned that he was the youngest member of the board of the American Cheese Society — then walked away, leaving her wholly charmed by this quirky bid to impress her. “I mean, what woman wouldn’t fall for a man who could bring her endless amounts of cheese?”

Mr. Jackson had a similar epiphany.

“I immediately felt a certain bond of trust and openness of my own, which was unusual for me,” he said. “I am an expert craftsman at wall building, if you will, but there was, from the start, a willingness to avoid that.”

Nevertheless, he decided to pace himself, allowing things to develop. And there was the fact he was dating someone else.

“So we became friends,” he said. “We’d do things in groups: go out after work and hang out at the Circle Bar or Mimi’s and hear music.”

Mr. Jackson, a former manager of a specialty grocery in Nashville and an apprentice cheesemaker in Indiana, had moved to New Orleans a few years earlier while dating the renowned chef Susan Spicer.

“I fell in love with the city in the early ’90s,” he said. “It was different then: more mysterious, more dangerous, so charming. The restaurant scene was so close, it was crazy. There were parallel lines everywhere.”

He learned about wine by hanging out at the bar at Emeril’s Delmonico after hours, drinking whatever bottles happened to be uncorked by its sommelier at the time, Chris Robles, who informally trained him. Ms. Spicer was cooking at her French Quarter flagship, Bayona. Before breaking up, she and Mr. Jackson opened a restaurant, Spice Inc., which has since closed. In 2000, Mr. Jackson opened Herbsaint with her and Donald Link.

Herbsaint “wasn’t a mom and pop business starting out, but it was definitely an indie rock, do-it-yourself place,” Mr. Jackson said. Heather Lolley, who was a bartender at Herbsaint at the time, remembered, “We were all so close, like a family: a smart, witty family of degenerates.”

A few months after he and Ms. La France met, Mr. Jackson’s father died. As he began confiding in her the particulars of his grief, friendship gave way to romance.

“I’ve never been able to be as honest and open with anyone else,” he said. “Plus, we just have so much damn fun together.”

But their evolving relationship brought on a work situation that was uncomfortable. Six months later, Ms. La France quit her job and became a bartender elsewhere. But she stayed close to her Herbsaint buddies and moved out of her windowless, mouse-ridden apartment and into Mr. Jackson’s home, a former candy factory in renovation mode. Amid the chaos, they hosted crayfish boils and dinner parties.

The bride and her father, John B. La France.

William Widmer for The New York Times

She also took up singing at the Circle Bar with a country band, the Plowboys.

“I never wanted to be a professional singer,” Ms. La France said. “That life is not attractive to me. I like singing when I feel like singing, and that’s what I loved about New Orleans: everyone is a musician. Your next-door neighbor is a fabulous musician, but it’s just a part of life.”

The idyll ended in August 2005. All music — even birdsong — was replaced by shocked silence. As the levees broke and the city filled with water, Ms. La France was in San Francisco visiting a friend. Mr. Jackson had boarded up their house and was driving to Florida, talking to her on a cellphone that died whenever lightning struck.

“My palms sweat even thinking about it,” she said. The two finally met up in Nashville. For over a month they drove around the Northeast, dropping in on friends and family. When they got to New York, they received the warmest welcome.

“You forget how close it was to 9/11,” Ms. La France said. “People were like, ‘We get it.’ ”

The couple returned to New Orleans for a year to close out his interest in Herbsaint and finish renovating the house before they relocated to NoLIta in New York. He has begun a wine and beverage consulting business and plans to open a restaurant in Brooklyn; she sells advertising at Vogue magazine.

“I’m pretty gregarious, and Ken loves spending time with lots of friends, so we make a good team,” she said. “He likes to cook. I like to eat. I like to sing, he likes to listen to live music. You can’t have two cooks in the kitchen.”

A year ago, there was a marriage proposal during a dinner at Herbsaint.

“Honestly, it wasn’t a big moment for us,” she said. “I really felt uneasy about the designation of being engaged. What’s wrong with the relationship we were already in? Why did people take us more seriously now that I had a really lovely ring?”

Mr. Jackson concurred.

“We were romantically happy living as a couple, almost intentionally avoiding the trappings of marriage,” he said. “But in the last couple of years, we began wanting to commit to something more substantial.”

The wedding doubled as a post-Katrina reunion for their friends, many of whom had shared a certain colorful version of New Orleans life until Katrina struck and scattered them. The night before, Ms. La France donned a flowing navy silk dress sprigged with white flowers.

“Very ’70s YSL,” she said in her new Vogue patois. She took the microphone at the Circle Bar to sing with the Plowboys, reunited for just one night.

For the occasion, she had learned Bruce Springsteen’s song “Tougher Than the Rest” and sang its plaintive, gritty lyrics to her husband-to-be.

“I hadn’t done that in years,” the bride said, refreshed by it. “It was a great way to get rid of pre-wedding jitters. It was like: ‘Oh, I’ve already been in front of people. I don’t need to worry about it anymore.’ ”